Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Facebook on '60 Minutes': The Lost BoomTown Is 'That Nasty Woman' Video

Here are two clips of the much longer interview I did with Lesley Stahl of CBS’ “60 Minutes” for their piece on Facebook, which did not appear on the program last night. They are a bit tougher on the company, although I think they are also quite fair (paging Brandee Barker: That’s right, fair!).

In the first, Stahl noted at the start that I am known as “that nasty woman” at Facebook and called “mean” by some there, because I have had a few tough questions in my BoomTown posts for the social-networking start-up’s business underpinnings.

If that’s the reason, especially since I am also clearly praising the service itself in this clip, I guess I consider the monikers to be compliments.

(One caveat–in this clip, I say Facebook has “no revenues,” but this is not true obviously as I and many others have reported. I believe just previous to this part of the interview, I was asked a lot about the particulars of the revenues, which I have written need to be much less dependent on guaranteed proceeds from Facebook’s relationship with Microsoft. But that part of the interview is not here, which gives the wrong impression that I am declaring that Facebook has no revenues. It does and they are growing strongly, but my point here was that revenues are still not in sync with Facebook’s oversized valuation.)

In this second clip below, Stahl asks me about the “Toddler CEO” title I foisted on co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg a while back. Let me say, at the time I meant it as a joke and not as a judgment (and I know my toddlers, given I have had two actual ones).

Still, it probably was unfair and even ageist (in the nontypical direction) to call a 23-year-old Zuckerberg a toddler. But, as I note here, Facebook probably at least has to consider a more experienced CEO in the planning for an eventual IPO.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald